1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and apparatus for shielding paint from being sprayed onto a roof structure of a building or home and, specifically, a paint shield configured to be temporarily self-retained to the roof structure to shield overspray from the roof structure while painting a side wall of the building or home.
2. State of the Art
When painting, it is obviously desirable that surfaces which should not receive paint, do not receive paint. For this reason, various paint shields have been developed over the years. Typical paint shields can include various hand-held devices with rigid straight edges, masking tape and even paper with an adhesive edge. Many of the paint shields on the market today are for indoor use for painting the interior walls, molding and ceiling of a home or building. When painting large surface areas, paint sprayers are often employed. Paint sprayers may be more efficient; however, painting with a sprayer often leads to spraying undesired surfaces. To overcome this problem, there are large paint shields with long handles available. However, these long-handled paint shields must be held by a painter in one hand while holding the paint sprayer in the other hand. This arrangement of manually holding the shield while painting is tiresome and cumbersome, resulting in fatigue and unavoidably leading to mistakes, discontinuities in the painted surface (due to undesired movement of the shield while painting) and accidental overspray to undesired surfaces not meant to be painted. Further, the accidental overspray problem becomes perpetuated due to the limited shield width of the long-handled paint shields.
Painters are often contracted to paint the exterior surfaces of homes. Exterior surfaces are usually very large surfaces and, as such, painters typically use paint sprayers to increase their efficiency. Typical to most exterior surfaces, the side walls are the desired painting surface and the roof structure is the undesired surface for receiving paint. Painters often employ the same long-handled paint shields used for interior use for exterior use to prevent over-spray from getting on the roof structure. Although a long-handled paint shield can assist in preventing over-spray from getting on the roof structure, the above-identified problem relating to manually holding a long-handled paint shield while painting is perpetuated due to the large surface areas at the exterior of the home.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a paint shield made specifically for exterior surfaces that allows the painter the efficiency desired by employing a paint sprayer while also limiting the painter's fatigue by limiting the necessary tools the painter must handle while painting. There also exists a need for a paint shield that shields large areas or entire side walls at a time, thereby limiting the potential of mistakes and overspray to undesired surfaces.